Damien Hirst, “Methoxyverapamil,” household gloss on canvas, two-inch spot, 75 x 69 inches, 1991
Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Ave., 555 West 24th St., 522 West 21st St.
Through February 18, free
www.gagosian.com
In the 1945 Warner Bros. short Hare Tonic, Bugs Bunny tricks Elmer Fudd into believing that the hilarious hare is infected with Rabbititus. “How do you know I’m contaminated? I haven’t got any symptoms. You don’t see no spots before my eyes, do ya?” Bugs asks as a group of colorful spots swirls in front of his face. Right now at all eleven Gagosian locations around the world — from Hong Kong, Geneva, Beverly Hills, and London to Paris, Rome, Athens, and all three galleries in New York City — people are seeing spots before their eyes, but it has nothing to do with Rabbititus. Instead, the outbreak is the result of Damien Hirst’s “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011,” comprising more than three hundred of the British bad boy’s household gloss on canvas works. Each painting features multiple dots of a single size, hand-painted by a single member of Hirst’s team, with no color repeated. In New York, the spots range from one millimeter to slightly more than one yard each, with most falling in the one-to-six-inch range, in circular patterns or straight up-and-down grids, creating a dizzying array as you make your way through room after room after room. The majority of the works are named after pharmaceutical and chemical products, referencing Hirst’s familiar cabinets filled with pills and other medical paraphernalia; among the titles are “Cefatrizine Propylene,” “Minoxidil,” “Benzoic Anhydride,” “Aminobenzaldehyde,” and “Hexadecanedioic Acid.” Hirst adds extra playfulness to the fifth floor of 980 Madison, with several canvases featuring spots that are barely visible or cut in half, as well as a “Controlled Substance Key Painting” that might or might not offer a way to decipher hidden meanings in the works.
Damien Hirst exhibit comes with its own dedicated store (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
If you look closely, it is easy to see that the arrangements are not perfect, indeed made by humans and not machines. You’ll also notice that just about everyone else in the gallery is smiling, getting a kick out of the seemingly endless display of colorful canvases, which can be cheerful and friendly, warm and welcoming. We are not a bit ashamed to admit that we thoroughly enjoyed our three-gallery jaunt through Hirst’s “Spot Paintings.” Perhaps it was our OCD working overtime, but we were drawn into the aesthetically pleasing, colorful works, excited by the repetition and consistency. So why are so many people unhappy with Hirst and decrying the exhibition as a self-centered display of artistic pomposity and conglomerate excess? Of course, it is impossible to look at the spot paintings and not think about Hirst, Inc. Hirst is big business, and his manipulation of the market for his works has made him a lot of enemies. Yes, there is a small concession in the 24th St. space as well a much bigger Spot Shop up on Madison Ave., where you can buy Hirst tote bags, clocks, stickers, skulls, pins, prints, and various other ephemera. So maybe the spots in front of Hirst’s eyes are made of giant dollar signs — you can practically hear the “ca-ching” as you meander through the galleries — but does the meta surrounding Hirst & Company take away from the sheer pleasure that most people derive from seeing these works? “It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color,” Hirst has said about the spot paintings. We found a whole lot of joy in this show, even if it is a way to make Hirst that much richer as he prepares for his first major museum career survey (beginning in April at the Tate Modern). And as far as Rabbititus goes? Well, you can consider the spots to be little more than hundreds of thousands of rabbit pellets deposited by an egotistical British Easter Bunny. You can think of them as the result of a Warholian cadre of assistants metaphorically screwing like rabbits. Or you can just get a huge kick at the nearly endless joy of color. It’s your choice.
Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. Rembert, one of the most fascinating characters you’re ever likely to come upon, will be at the Pelham Fritz Recreation Center on February 9 at 1:00 with Ducat and producer Mark Urman for a free screening of All Me, and what should be an enlightening Q&A afterward. (Rembert and Uman will also be at the Montclair Art Museum on February 16 at 7:00 as part of the fifth annual Montclair African American Film Festival, which is also free.) And if you’re as captivated by Rembert’s story as we are, you can see more of his work in his “Amazing Grace” exhibition, running through May 5 at the 